{"id":2489,"date":"2020-06-02T16:56:03","date_gmt":"2020-06-02T16:56:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2489"},"modified":"2020-06-02T16:56:03","modified_gmt":"2020-06-02T16:56:03","slug":"are-lcas-greenwashing-plastic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/?p=2489","title":{"rendered":"Are LCAs Greenwashing Plastic ?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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image JESUISMALIN.BE<\/a><\/span>\u00a0Creative Commons 4.0<\/em><\/p>\n

LCA, Life Cycle Analysis or Assessment, is supposed to be an objective way to compare the environmental footprint of products, and is a mainstay of corporate decision-making in sustainability.\u00a0 But it\u2019s blind to plastic pollution, leaving it available to be mis-used in comparisons of plastic with other materials.\u00a0 LCA-based comparisons of plastic bags with other bags for example have been widely cited and give a misleading impression that plastic is \u2018greener\u2019, while not assessing plastic as a pollutant at all.<\/h3>\n

Characterisation of plastic pollution is complex and a relatively new topic but recent work from Germany\u2019s Fraunhofer Institute may enable development of a standard measure of plastic as a persistent and potentially bioaccumulative pollutant.\u00a0 Meanwhile, campaigners, journalists and environmentalists, as well as scientists who may be commissioned to carry out LCA studies, should be alert to the risk of \u2018greenwashing\u2019 plastic through conventional LCAs.\u00a0 The initial wave of concern heightened by Blue Planet II has subsided but the plastics industry\u2019s fight to rehabilitate itself continues, and with essential uses for PPE at the forefront of covid responses and rock-bottom prices for oil, virgin plastic is cheap and the recycling market has collapsed in many places.\u00a0 The flood of plastic pollution shows little sign of abating anytime soon.<\/h3>\n

 <\/p>\n

Introduction<\/strong><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

You may have noticed that despite various \u2018bans\u2019 on plastic bags there are quite a lot of media and social media stories in which plastic is compared with alternative materials and plastic is found to be \u2018greener\u2019, for example plastic bags compared to cotton bags, or plastic compared to glass or steel bottles.<\/p>\n

Track back to the sources of these stories and you usually find they result from a LCA or Life Cycle Analysis or Assessment (for example carrier bags<\/a> \/ bottles<\/a>). \u00a0The out-take from these stories generally gets condensed to \u2018plastic not so bad after all\u2019, or glass\/ paper\/ cotton\/ aluminium (etc) is \u2018actually worse for the environment than plastic \u2013 says study\u2019.<\/p>\n

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BBC World video<\/em><\/a> including a much repeated \u2018fact\u2019 that a cotton bag needs to be used 131 times \u201cto have the same environmental impact\u201d as a plastic bag. <\/em><\/p>\n

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Press coverage, even from the BBC\u2019s \u2018reality check\u2019 unit, tends to convert assessments into a single dimension such as \u2018greener\u2019 or \u2018the environmental impact\u2019.\u00a0 The original factors used for the assessment are often shorn away in the telling of the story, and as it moves along the media chain from the study to the out-take, and through social media.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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(This BBC report cites a LCA <\/em>report<\/em><\/a> by the Environment Agency for England and Wales on bags available in 2006, published in 2011.\u00a0 The \u2018answer comes down to\u2019 because those were\u00a0 criteria put into the analysis).<\/em><\/p>\n

LCAs are widely used in industry and business to try and standardise environmental and sometimes social comparisons between material options, from \u2018cradle to grave\u2019.\u00a0 Some LCAs are bespoke, invented for a particular purpose but many rely on using or adapting an off-the shelf methodology which of course helps with comparability.\u00a0 LCAs (review article<\/a>) are required to comply with ISO 14040 guidelines which specify four main stages.<\/p>\n

On the face of it, a comparison based on a LCA, with its quantification and set methodology, seems more objective and authoritative than other ways of making a decision.\u00a0 As they are detailed, and cumbersome and demanding to conduct, they come with an aura of expertise as well as dependability.<\/p>\n

But at the moment there is a serious problem in trying to use them to compare plastic with other materials, which at its most basic, is that plastic pollution is invisible to most if not all standard LCAs.<\/p>\n

Here for example<\/a> are the categories used in the EN15804 (a standard for LCAs in the construction sector):<\/p>\n

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EN15804 \u2013 a European standard<\/em><\/p>\n

If a whale dies from the mechanical obstruction of its organs by ingesting plastic for example, then no matter how many times that is reported in the scientific literature, there is no place for it in most of the impact inventories used to conduct \u2018Impact Assessments\u2019 in LCAs. The same would go for seabird or turtle entanglement, or starvation due to ingesting plastic due to mistaking it for food.\u00a0 If they were poisoned by toxic chemicals released by the plastic that might count but there would need to have commissioned a specific study to produce input data, or that factor would need to appear in a standard reference database such as Ecoinvent<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The obvious large items \u2018macro\u2019 and the smaller flakes of \u2018meso\u2019 plastic whose impacts created public concern and a little political action through campaigns and programmes like David Attenborough\u2019s Blue Planet II, are simply dismissed as a \u2018littering\u2019 problem and not captured in most LCAs. \u00a0But there\u2019s more to it than that because \u2018microplastic\u2019 is not included either.<\/p>\n

In a 2017 blog<\/a> I argued that policy-makers should treat plastic as a persistent organic pollutant, and regulate for a phase-out except for essential uses.\u00a0 Several groups of scientists had already made<\/a> similar calls, pointing to it\u2019s effectively indefinite lifetime, its accumulation in the environment, its roles as a source and vector of toxic substances, and its un-nerving capacity to almost endlessly fragment in the environment.\u00a0 Since then a growing number of studies have confirmed the omnipresent nature of plastic pollution and it\u2019s ability to travel throughout human and animal bodies, and it\u2019s as yet not-well-defined potential to cause disruption to important cellular mechanisms, suggesting that like forms of radiation, it may have no \u2018safe level\u2019 of exposure.<\/p>\n

With the possible exception of measures of toxicity derived from substances directly leaching from plastic (freshwater, marine and human health toxicity do routinely feature in LCAs) most of the features of plastic pollution are not accounted for.\u00a0 So because other factors are<\/em> included, such as embedded energy costs and emissions like CO2, plastic often looks environmentally better than alternatives.\u00a0 A glass bottle for example,\u00a0 will usually have a bigger carbon footprint than a plastic one of the same volume.\u00a0 Not the same plastic pollution footprint of course but LCAs don\u2019t count the plastic footprint.<\/p>\n

As Julien Boucher and colleagues put it in the 2020 IUCN report The Marine Plastic Footprint<\/em><\/a> (p4):\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018a challenge with LCA methodologies is that they do not account for plastic as a pollutant, but rather only for the indirect effects of plastic use, e.g. depletion of resources, energy consumption, or emission of chemical contaminants. LCA methodologies neither provide an inventory of the marine plastic leakage nor characterise factors to assess the impacts of plastics on ecosystems or human health. This lack of appropriate accounting of plastic leakage has encouraged companies to massively favour plastic packaging in many situations, due to its lightweight nature and low carbon requirements\u2019<\/em><\/p>\n

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Slides from a<\/em> 2018 presentation<\/em><\/a> by Julien Boucher<\/em><\/p>\n

The Environment Agency (EA) study cited by the BBC in 2019 for instance (report above) considered Global Warming Potential and \u2018other impacts: resource depletion, acidification, eutrophication, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity, marine aquatic ecotoxicity, terrestrial ecotoxicity and photochemical oxidation (smog formation)\u2019 but not the creation, accumulation and effects of plastic as a pollutant.\u00a0 \u2018End of life\u2019 waste management options such as recycling were included but not \u2018the effects of littering\u2019 and \u2018discharges to water and soil\u2019 were \u2018outside the system boundary\u2019. (Studies which identified littering effects were mentioned in an annexe but played no part in the assessment).<\/p>\n

The highlighted finding of the study only focused on climate impact and was featured in the only graphic included in the executive summary:<\/p>\n

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Not surprisingly the point that registered with journalists was the idea that for re-usable cotton bags to have the same environmental impact as \u2018disposable\u2019 plastic carrier bags, they would need to be re-used 131 times.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

The study drew on 2006 data and was published in 2011 before the 2017 peak of public concern (see this previous blog<\/a>) but factoids from such LCA studies are constantly recirculated and most if not all current LCA methodologies still fail to register plastic as a pollutant.<\/p>\n

Last October the Dutch-based campaigning NGO Plastic Soup Foundation launched an attack on LCAs, declaring<\/a> \u2018The plastics industry abuses lifecycle analysis (LCA) in communication surrounding plastic pollution\u2019.\u00a0 It pointed out that LCAs often do not take the end-of-life consequences of a product into account and may make optimistic assumptions about recovery and recycling.\u00a0 It criticised a recent Dutch industry campaign\u00a0Plastic Truth versus Plastic Fable<\/em><\/strong><\/a>\u00a0for using LCAs as the basis of a claim that plastic bags were more environmentally friendly.<\/p>\n

The Foundation noted that on the one hand, LCAs regularly rate plastic as more environmentally friendly while on the other, 80% of plastic ends up as waste in the environment, causing immense harm to marine wildlife. It stated:<\/p>\n

\u2018Industry must, therefore, stop using the current LCA method for promoting single-use packaging plastic in particular. In the meantime, a legitimate supplementary criterion that takes into account the impact plastic has once it inevitably reaches the environment should be agreed upon\u2019.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0<\/em>\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

A Solution For Plastics in LCAs ?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No such measure has been agreed upon, although in 2019 researchers from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and the University of Leiden proposed an \u2018entanglement factor<\/a>\u2019.<\/p>\n

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McHardy et al 2019 proposing a LCA entanglement factor<\/em><\/p>\n

In 2019 one study<\/a> took a Spanish LCA assessing different bags and showed that when a \u2018pragmatic littering indicator\u2019 was introduced, it produced \u2018precisely the opposite\u2019 ranking to when GWP (climate impact) was the main criterion.<\/p>\n

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From Civancik-Uslu et al 2019 \u2013 a littering indicator<\/em><\/p>\n

More recently, Daniel Maga reported on the work he and colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute<\/a> (the German institute for applied science) are undertaking to systematically characterise and quantify the risks attendant on plastic as a pollutant.\u00a0 Speaking at a virtual conference of Setac<\/a> in May 2020, Maga gave a presentation on a research methodology for plastic emissions available here in video form<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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From Daniel Maga presentation (video) at Setac May 2020<\/em><\/p>\n

Maga points out that current end of life modelling as used in LCAs does not consider littering or loss of plastics through abrasion or weathering.\u00a0 He proposes a characterization factor combining fate, exposure, effect and severity and asks how the risks of plastic emissions can be captured in a LCA.\u00a0 Maga cites the ECHA (European Chemicals Agency) which asserts that there is limited evidence of environmental risks from microplastics and no suggestion of bioaccumulation of hydrophobic organic compounds in organisms (eg many pesticides, PCBs) but also that conventional risk factors may not work with micro or nano plastic risks. He proposes that the \u2018fate factor\u2019 is sufficient to capture the main risk from plastics due to their extreme persistence, so they should be treated as a \u2018non-threshold substance\u2019 in a similar way to PBTs<\/a> (persistent, bio accumulative and toxic substances) for which any release can be assumed to create a risk. This is a classic case in which the Precautionary Principle should be applied (there being a priori reason to act even without definitive evidence of the impact having already occurred).<\/p>\n

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Detailed characterisation of plastic pollution is a formidable task.\u00a0\u00a0 Maga goes on to itemise a mind-numbing welter of technical challenges.\u00a0 To deal with these in a way that could be included in a LCA, he proposes calculation of plastic equivalents, homing in on a SDR or \u2018Specific Surface Degradation Rate\u2019 measure, published<\/a> in February.\u00a0\u00a0 (How micro-plastics degrade is strongly dependent on shape \u2013 watch the presentation for details)<\/p>\n

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Where\u2019s this going? If used, such an approach would enable decision-makers such as government agencies to compare and regulate plastics according to their risk as driven by fate-factors such as persistence.<\/p>\n

Maga says \u201cwe imagine\u201d it generating tables such as this one for macroplastic emissions (based on estimates from the plastikbudget<\/a> project in Germany), showing rates of loss, where they are (environmental \u2018compartments\u2019 such as soil or water), type of plastic, degradation rates, SDR, length and shape:<\/p>\n

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And the same for microplastics<\/p>\n

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If a system like this were to be adopted by decision-makers, it could enable fairer and more realistic LCA comparisons, and help prioritise regulatory action as well as choices within companies.\u00a0 In theory possible that a country like the UK or more realistically the US, could do this alone but both are seriously weakened in terms of capability by a decade or more of environmental back-pedalling and hollowing out of expertise in central government and agencies.\u00a0\u00a0 The EU, probably led by the economic and scientific powerhouse of Germany, is probably the main hope for scientific R & D in tacking the plastics crisis.<\/p>\n

Beware The LCA<\/strong><\/p>\n

In the meantime, environmental correspondents, NGOs and campaigners need to be wary of LCAs. \u00a0They should check the methodologies behind any claims to compare the \u2018green-ness\u2019 or \u2018environmental impact\u2019 of plastics and alternative materials, particularly where data has been fed into the blender of a LCA to give a \u2018simple\u2019 result.<\/p>\n

Although it may be a big ask for researchers hungry for money, scientists asked to conduct similar studies should also ask themselves why they are being commissioned, and whether the framing that a brief will create, is designed in advance to greenwash plastic by what is included or excluded.<\/p>\n

Cognitive Biases<\/strong><\/p>\n

Researchers should also be careful about the way findings are converted into everyday \u00a0terms. One example of framing and possible inbuilt cognitive bias is use of the \u2018number of times you\u2019d have to use a bag\u2019 metric.\u00a0 This may seem innocuous but it positions a large number against a small number by taking as its \u2018impact\u2019 reference point the \u2018footprint\u2019 of a single plastic bag (excluding the plastic pollution impact), and comparing it to a different type of bag (eg cotton) and then working out how many times the for example cotton bag \u2018would need to be used\u2019 to \u2018be as good as\u2019 the plastic bag.\u00a0 The UK EA 2006\/2011 study mentioned earlier calculated 131 times and the 2018 Danish study<\/a> found (p 80) \u2018conventional cotton carrier bags should be reused at least 50 times before being disposed of; organic cotton carrier bags should be reused 150 times based on their environmental production cost\u2019.<\/p>\n

What this does is to frame the consumer choice in terms of effort required in order to get the reward of being environmentally friendly.\u00a0 Either use a disposable plastic bag, or you have to go shopping with a cotton bag 130-150 times!\u00a0 Can you imagine – (your brain does that instantly without you thinking it through) \u2013 it\u2019s just not feasible is it?\u00a0 This invokes the anchoring heuristic<\/a>: the busy (time-pressed, time-is-a-scarce-commodity) shopper is given the first single-action choice as a reference point (the anchor) and the second (131x) action) to compare to it, just in order to get the same reward.\u00a0 It\u2019s a no-brainer that plastic is the more feasible choice.<\/p>\n

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The focal<\/a> effect in this snap judgement also stops us asking awkward questions like \u201chow many times can you actually re-use a cotton bag anyway ?\u201d\u00a0 I have no idea but some suggest durable bags can be re-used 500 times. Think of other items made out of cotton (requires a frame-change).\u00a0 Would you be satisfied with a cotton shirt or pair of trousers than could not be worn for at least 131 days, and would it \u2018make more sense\u2019 to replace them with 131 pairs of disposable plastic trousers if they had a lower carbon footprint?<\/p>\n

Even setting aside the omission of the very reason plastic needs to be assessed \u2013 plastic pollution \u2013 and any other doubts that might exist about the assumptions made about non-plastic choices in these studies, the cognitive behavioural bias of the framing is clear.\u00a0 Try thinking about it the other way around.\u00a0 \u201cWhat\u2019s better, to use just one cotton bag for your daily shopping over the next four months, or 131 plastic bags which you then throw away?\u201d\u00a0 \u2018Obviously\u2019 the re-usable bag is an environmentally better choice.\u00a0 Now the effort implication of the cotton bag has disappeared and you are triggered to think about environmental responsibility <\/em>by being reminded that these are \u2018disposable\u2019 short-lifetime plastic bags.\u00a0 Picture that huge pile of waste plastic bags.<\/p>\n

In a fleeting mental encounter with such a study factoid, as in watching a 30 second news clip, another mental bias is triggered, which is WYSIATI<\/a> \u2018what you see is all there is\u2019.\u00a0 The \u2018issue\u2019 captured is the story is the choice between two bags.<\/p>\n

Other possible redesign options or behaviours, sometimes mentioned in the fine-print of LCA studies, are not shown and thus do not exist in the mental processing.\u00a0 Using a wheeled shopping basket for example (no bags needed), or a rucksack you already own and also use for other purposes, or re-using a carboard box the store provides, or a host of other possible options that might resolve the \u2018bag problem\u2019.<\/p>\n

The focus is kept restricted to the plastic bag v other bag, as in a \u2018horse-race poll\u2019 in politics where prospective voters are only asked about the \u2018two main candidates\u2019 and not the five others running, so they disappear from view in stories reporting the result of the poll, triggering voters to make an instant mental choice between the two candidates featured, not the total seven.<\/p>\n

That device is popular with larger political parties. Restricting the focus and terms of a LCA-based study can enable those with a vested commercial interest in say, plastic, to generate seemingly scientific, impartial and \u2018objective\u2019 findings that happen to show their product in a good light.<\/p>\n

\u2018Gold Standard\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

No wonder perhaps that the plastics industry loves LCAs as they stand at the moment.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The British Plastics Federation website states<\/a>: \u2018They are as close to the gold standard of understanding the environmental consequences of a product as researchers can currently get\u2019.<\/p>\n

Imagine you are in the driving seat of the \u2018public affairs\u2019 strategy for the plastics industry, or its Siamese Twin the oil and gas industry.\u00a0 How would your situation report go? Maybe something like this:<\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

Covid has brought mixed blessings but generally things still look good. The vast majority is still made from oil or gas and despite the response to Blue Planet II, plastics use worldwide is still increasing and <\/em>rapidly rising<\/em><\/a>in Europe.\u00a0 Pressure to cut carbon emissions is a problem but it can be turned to advantage if plastic can be positioned as greener than alternatives in energy terms. Unfortunately one side-effect of Blue Planet II and the associated wave of campaigning was the introduction of bans and restrictions on high profile \u2018single use plastic\u2019 such as bags, starting in Europe and spreading around the world. <\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

A 2019 European Environment Agency <\/em>review<\/em><\/a> of the measures taken by European countries to reduce the plastics problem found revealed that 37 of the 173 measures identified were market based and most \u2018referred to fees for plastic carrier bags\u2019.\u00a0 <\/em>\u00a0We can live with those but the real risk is if the same political thinking behind them (respond to popular sentiment against plastic) spreads to the rest of the packaging market and other uses. We particularly need to keep politicians thinking bout plastic as an issue that can be solved by better waste management and more consumer commitment to recycling, and not \u2018phase-outs\u2019.\u00a0 This is why it\u2019s even now important to discredit the \u2018bag bans\u2019 as an irrational and regrettable reflex, not borne out by \u2018the science\u2019.<\/em><\/p>\n

Some good news is that the more scientific end of the media covering environmental issues is particularly motivated to encourage \u2018rational\u2019 rather than \u2018emotional\u2019 environmentalism, which means they have an appetite for the quantified and factual.\u00a0 Here LCAs are our friend as they generate factual proofs that plastic can be the better environmental choice.\u00a0 <\/em><\/p>\n

Take for example the British popular science publication New Scientist. In 2015 it carried an article \u2018<\/em>Plastic Bag Levy Is A Drop in the Ocean On Environmental Grounds<\/em><\/a>\u2019:<\/em><\/p>\n

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Its life cycle analysis of a number of different types of shopping bags found that a cotton bag would have to be used 131 times to be below the total global warming potential of an HDPE bag used only once. And once you factor in reuse of HDPE bags as bin liners, which is reasonably common, this reuse factor rises. The point made by the study is that the global warming impact of HDPE bags is negligible<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s good to be able to report that New Scientist went on to cite that 131-times fact at least twice more in 2018, \u00a0in an <\/em>article advising its readers<\/em><\/a> (May 2018): <\/em><\/p>\n

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and in a <\/em>Leader<\/em><\/a> (June 2018):<\/em><\/p>\n

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The LCA 131-times example has been repeated many times, for example <\/em>here<\/em><\/a> in The Conversation, <\/em>here<\/em><\/a> in Stamford Magazine, <\/em>here<\/em><\/a> in Earth Times, and <\/em>here<\/em><\/a> in Business Insider, all channels likely to reach this \u2018Rational-Environmental\u2019 audience.\u00a0 There is no way we can make plastic popular with all the public but we don\u2019t need to \u2013 to paraphrase Frank Luntz on climate, we just need to maintain doubt about alternatives, while we keep on growing. <\/em><\/p>\n

**<\/p>\n

That\u2019s enough of the imaginary report. \u00a0I freely admit that my view of the activities of the plastics industry is somewhat jaundiced as a result of seeing some of its lobbying activities and the way, for example, that it used the \u2018litter\u2019 frame from the 1970s onwards (see A Beautiful But Evil Strategy<\/a>) to prevent people seeing plastic as a pollutant, and still uses today<\/a>.\u00a0 It\u2019s in the industry\u2019s interests to see these misleading \u2018factoids\u2019 derived from LCAs in wide circulation, spreading like memes.<\/p>\n

Even better than having them repeated in a \u2018straight\u2019 science magazine like the New Scientist<\/em> is if the pro-plastic LCA findings are endorsed by re-appearing in publications from environmental organisations themselves.\u00a0\u00a0 This can happen when \u2018green\u2019 groups are engaged in projects framed by environmental waste \u2018management\u2019 assumptions, and are trying to optimise choices from inside the status quo, rather than to change the strategic drivers.\u00a0 The \u2018circular economy\u2019 community is particularly vulnerable.<\/p>\n

For example in 2020 the UK group the Green Alliance published a report Plastic Promises: What The Grocery Sector Is Really Doing About Packaging<\/a> for its Circular Economy Task Force \u00a0whose members are the corporates PwC, Kingfisher,\u00a0Viridor, Walgreens Boots Alliance, SUEZ recycling and recovery UK, and Veolia.\u00a0 \u00a0It noted:<\/p>\n

Given the demand for change since the BBC\u2019s Blue Planet II aired in 2017, and the promises that have been made since, one might have expected a considerable market shift away from plastic by now, at least for packaging in the grocery sector. \u00a0There have been some minor changes \u2026 but, overall, the proportion of plastic packaging seen on most supermarket shelves, and the amount collected as waste and reported to the Environment Agency, has not altered significantly. <\/em><\/p>\n

Based on anonymous interviews within the sector, author Libby Peake reported that despite one of the supermarkets reporting a \u2018ferocious\u2019 anti-plastic response from consumers with an 800% increase in customer queries, actual behaviour change was limited. Professionals such as brand managers cited a host of frustrations, from dubious brand claims to unintended consequences of switches, inadequate recycling (Britain is a mess) and difficulties sourcing recycled material.<\/p>\n

The Green Alliance study was no doubt conducted with the best of intentions but the conventional plastics-dominated packaging industry will have been delighted that it also\u00a0 repeated as fact the LCA-based findings from \u2018a 2011 study for the Northern Ireland Assembly \u2026 that paper bags generally require four times as much energy to manufacture as plastic bags\u2019 and the Danish study which \u2018concluded that \u2026 a paper bag would need to be reused 43 times to have a lower impact than the average plastic bag\u2019.<\/p>\n

The plastics industry PRs will also have appreciated the headline \u201cwe can\u2019t just replace plastics\u201d quoting Libby Peake in an interview<\/a> about the study with the Packaging Europe (used in its weekly newsletter).<\/p>\n

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A Question of Strategy<\/strong><\/p>\n

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The real issue for change groups in relation to LCAs is one of strategy: what are you trying to achieve and by what steps will that come about?\u00a0\u00a0 The above quote from the packaging industry magazine asserts that climate change is \u2018an even more serious problem\u2019 than \u2018plastic\u2019.\u00a0\u00a0 In what sense?\u00a0 What does this mean?\u00a0 From whose point of view?<\/p>\n

As Green Alliance\u2019s report records, most people (public in the UK) in fact reject the implied trade-off and think that climate and plastic are of equal importance. If you asked \u2018experts\u2019, then with all sorts of caveats, they would probably give you a similar answer.\u00a0 But if you asked about a specific case, as in for example choices about bags or bottles, you might get a different answer depending on people\u2019s understanding and how they assume change can happen on either \u2018issue\u2019.<\/p>\n

In the end a LCA essentially constructs a two dimensional rating by adding up the results of a set of scores to enable rankings from best to worst.\u00a0\u00a0 In my view, change strategy has to be at least three dimensional.\u00a0 One tool I developed for doing this in relation to potential campaign targets is the \u2018ambition box\u2019.\u00a0 It has three axes, the hardness or difficulty of a change target,\u00a0 the size of that target (how much of the problem it represents), and the significance of the target (the consequential effects or potentiation resulting from the achievement of the target).<\/p>\n

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Ambition Box from <\/em>How To Win Campaigns<\/em><\/a> edn 2<\/em><\/p>\n

Problem management logic is mainly dictated by the first two axes.\u00a0 For example it would make sense to start with the \u2018lowest hanging fruit\u2019, the biggest soft and easy target first.\u00a0 Strategic change logic is mainly dictated by significance.\u00a0 LCA is fundamentally a tool for problem management (eg making optimal choices at one level which are all sub-optimal options in the \u2018bigger picture\u2019), not strategic change. \u00a0An exception, as has been argued above, is that it can be mis-used to obstruct strategic change.<\/p>\n

Put this another way: with a wicked global problem like climate change or plastic pollution, we need a strategy to ultimately eliminate the problem not just manage it.\u00a0 This is why campaign groups and now most governments are trying to eliminate fossil fuels from the energy system, not just increase energy efficiency, and why human-made industrial greenhouse gases like HFCs need to be simply phased out completely and replaced with alternatives, not just reduced to a particular level or \u2018so far as possible\u2019.<\/p>\n

Plastic made from oil or gas is important as a direct contributor to climate change (the carbon gets released adding to environmental CO2) but its not as important as getting to zero carbon energy across industry, transport or electricity generation, which would \u2018deal with\u2019 all the energy related \u2018carbon problem\u2019 behind production of all sorts of bags, bottles and so on.\u00a0 So the carbon footprint of plastic is not necessarily an \u2018even more important\u2019 problem if looking at say packaging, than plastic pollution is.\u00a0 On the other hand, packaging certainly is the major source of plastic pollution, along with tyre wear.\u00a0 So for plastic pollution these are strategic targets, requiring substitution, or \u2018replacing plastic\u2019 within a regulated phase-out, excepting essential uses.<\/p>\n

Naive Rationalists<\/strong><\/p>\n

LCAs are simply not set up to make (or even really facilitate) such judgements but this may not be widely understood by many of those who use them on a regular basis.\u00a0 Others may be \u2018naive rationalists\u2019, naive about the way LCAs are easily mis-used to \u2018game the system\u2019 and attracted to what seems a \u2018rational calculus\u2019 defining \u2018the right answer\u2019.<\/p>\n

This is what Michael Warhurst, a UK chemicals expert and Executive Director of ChemTrust<\/a> told me about LCAs:<\/p>\n

\u201c<\/em>LCAs are a nightmare, as it is easy to get the answer you want & ultimately the data & assumptions that they are based on are very poor. On chemicals, for example, they use old databases and assumptions while REACH is constantly identifying new problems & also finding that know problem chemicals are active at lower levels.<\/em><\/p>\n

I think for an effective assessment you have to disaggregate different elements & create a system that is as transparent as possible\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

I\u00a0don\u2019t think LCAs will ever be satisfactory, but they are popular as an apparent \u2019simple\u2019 solution – they are fine to use within an organisation if you know what you want and are comparing options, but they are terrible for policymaking in a wider sense\u201d.<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course there are many possible dimensions of significance.\u00a0 One of the psychological-political ones is public resonance and iconography.\u00a0 Plastic bags and bottles now fall into this category, which is one reason why politicians took some sort of action on those, and why old LCA-factoids on bags and bottles keep being put back into the public conversation.<\/p>\n

Some of those involved with LCAs rightly point out that they were not supposed to be used to form policy but when their results derive from assessments which manifestly fail to capture key environmental impacts, and are designed in a way that gives a stamp of green approval to plastic, and these are<\/em> put into the public domain, they can of course affect politics and policy.<\/p>\n

Finally, a question for those pursuing the \u2018Circular Economy\u2019 is what are the steps by which it can actually be brought about, and are any of these strategic ?\u00a0 If not, you may remain trapped inside a universe of many small sub-optimal choices which you are trying to use to change drivers that are being set by the strategies of others, such as the plastics and oil industries.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

image JESUISMALIN.BE\u00a0Creative Commons 4.0 LCA, Life Cycle Analysis or Assessment, is supposed to be an objective way to compare the environmental footprint of products, and is a mainstay of corporate decision-making in sustainability.\u00a0 But it\u2019s blind to plastic pollution, leaving … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2489"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2535,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2489\/revisions\/2535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}